In this short paper, I argue against what I call the “belonging to” interpretation of group selection in scenarios in which a group’s fitness is defined as the per capita reproductive output of the individuals of the group. According to this interpretation, group selection acts on “belonging to” properties of individuals, i.e. on relational or contextual properties that all the individuals of a group share simply by belonging to that group; thus, if differences in the individuals’ “belonging to” properties cause differences in their fitness, group selection sensu the “belonging to” interpretation is said to be at work. I argue that the main problem with the “belonging to” interpretation is that it confuses evolutionary changes due to differences in environmental quality with evolutionary changes due to selection. In other words, I argue that, in the majority of cases, this interpretation actually takes the “selection” out of the “group selection” notion it aims to interpret: by adopting this perspective, one implicitly commits to explaining the evolutionary change under consideration not by a kind of selection (be it individual or group selection), but by differences in the environmental quality experienced by individual types.

中文翻译：

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反对在多层次选择理论中使用“属于”属性的注释

在这篇简短的论文中，我反对我所说的对群体选择的“属于”解释，在这种情况下，群体的适应度被定义为群体个体的人均生殖产出。根据这种解释，群体选择作用于个体的“属于”属性，即群体中的所有个体通过属于该群体而共享的关系或上下文属性；因此，如果个体“属于”属性的差异导致了他们适应度的差异，则群体选择认为“属于”解释在起作用。我认为“属于”解释的主要问题是它将由于环境质量差异引起的进化变化与由于选择引起的进化变化混淆了。换句话说，我认为，